Like they say you live in a place but you only do the tourist stuff when people come to visit…

In the past four weeks we have pretty much kept to the suburbs even when belle maman was here for the week.

This weekend one of the schoolfriend of the futue Mrs Scotsdreamer was here as a stopgap between flights, it was fun as French, English and German was heard through the appartement.

So rather than hang around in the ville we went walking all over Paris, on Saturday it was châtelet, champs elysses and the louvre and on Sunday it was the trocadero, tour Eiffel and notre dame. In all almost 50,000 steps taken.

As you can probably guess my feet are agony…

So the past 4 weeks has been fun and there has been ups and downs but it definately has not been a mistake.

I just have to figure out the buses now

In India there us an ongoing joke about IST (Indian Standard Time) actually meaning Indian Stretchy Time, though now I’m a pseudo Parisian I am starting to see that it is not just limited to India.

I tend to leave work at 6 pm and catch a bus which drops me off in Clichy, once there I have to wait for a second bus to take me to chez moi.

In Paris there are the ‘time until…’ boards at the bus stops letting you know the time of the next bus. Normally this says something between 3 and 5 minutes, recently, however, I could have won the Gala National Bingo Jackpot watching the numbers on these boards.

Usually they don’t move from 0, 1 or even 2 minutes for five or ten minutes, and even then when they do move it isn’t guaranteed to follow the normal flow of time… I saw one in Porte de Clichy that went from 10 minutes to 1 minute to “estimated” 83 minutes all in the space of a phonecall to the future mrs Scotsdreamer (it was the ‘you left work ages ago, where are you?’ call)

Just as I readied myself to get a taxi the bus came – the board was still saying 27 minutes and I was subtly confused. This bus was full, more so than the images you see of the Indian railways…

So I’m now resigned to spending a trip looking at some strange arm pit, but the bus stops, and the driver tells everyone to get off and drives away?!?! It turns out it is his lunch/coffee/cause commuter hell break…

The board is now saying 37 minutes.

As this has been happening quite frequently I am now thinking healthy and walk a couple of stops from work and then walk from the Clichy Mairie to the house, except the pollution is giving me on hell of a case of plegm…

On the positive side, at least my DS Walk With Me is usually green!

Anyway I’ll probably only panic if Bob Crow gets a job with the RATP…

The joys of commuting!

Thanks for reading,

The Scotsdreamer

p.s. I ended up waiting 15 minutes for the bus and thankfully there wasn’t am armpit in sight

So week three comes to a close, I have become a French worker and have discovered to some part the French Bureaucracy and that French time sometimes expands with a bus every 10 minutes twice making me wait 30 minutes!

Apart from that it has been an interesting week, with the Belle Maman helping us out with the unpacking of the house and finally getting the delivery of the TV decoder and Neufbox.

I am still finding my feet and at lunchtime if there are no colleagues to chaperone me I make my way to Franprix and wander along the aisles and pick out a nice bit of fruit and and bit of dark chocolate.

I don’t know if it just me or if Woking had a poor fruit selection but the Fruit here is Fantastic! I have discovered what is called in English (well American) the DonutPeach, my god are these things good…

Apparently the weather has been unusually hot, more than twice that of my native town in the West of Scotland, my freckles are converging into one…

So, it will soon be a month that I have been an expatriot and so far the only problem I have is the lingo… slowly but surely I will parles francais!

Allons-y…

I have to admit, in the past I have often been accused of talking Merde,
this fact should mean that writing this post should come relatively easy to me.

No I’m not going to specifically talk about the brown stuff but about the Parisian fixation of holes in the ground,
especially in bars.

Men by nature are designed to direct their aim, admittedly our accuracy isn’t always perfect, especially after an evening of drinking too much.

Buy why in the middle of Montparnasse, and more so in the outskirts, do you see a hole in the ground where the throne should proudly sit when you enter a gents.

Fair enough, but we have to remember that steadiness is in proportion to the
amount of alcohol that is in the system. The sheer ability to squat steadily over a hole after a series of drinks beggars belief, look for example Friday night in any major UK city.

We see singing drunks who are as stable as the house of straw in the face of the big bad wolf, one blow and they’ll topple…

Now I suppose that you could say that there are reasons that the “squat” toilet is favoured over the traditional throne, but for me I am at a complete loss…

Considering Montparnasse is in a tourist district this is quite a view to present to the rest of the world. Remember that the majority of our friends over the pond see Paris as stuck in the 40’s, doesn’t this just add to the myth of underdevelopment?

Well I suppose I better go practice my squats…

So my first day as a French worker and commuter started at 7 this morning, used to the past two weeks this was no mean feat.

I managed to get to the bus stop before 8 where o patiently waited forthe driver to come an get into the bus.

Overall the two journeys were not as bad as I was expecting and half an hour later I was outside the office an hour early. Thankfully there is a cafe nearby…

It’s almost 5pm now and it has been quite an experience, I haven’t has to sign anything yet which is surprising as I was expecting to sign my life away all day.

I have my own office!!!!

I am used to an open environment but I’ve been given my own little box, don’t know if I’ll be the pet Brit or us it’s just because I’ll make lists of calls in English, I suppose I’ll have to get used to it.

I’ve got my computer a French laptop with a French keyboard with a uk configuration, made me realise I am actually a touch typist even though I look at the keyboard.

Still no email access so I have been doing everything with a personal address, almost time for the bus (I think)

In the end my first day was ok until I got home. when memories of Andy Capp came rushing to me with the future Mrs Scotsdreamer waiting on me with a rolling pin…

I suppose it could be funny but not really what I was looking forward to…

Ah well c’est la vie